


blood, dirt, strawberries

by Trojie



Category: Inception (2010), Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Limbo, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 10:22:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4176252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't wanna die. You wanna live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blood, dirt, strawberries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [treacle_tartlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/treacle_tartlet/gifts).



> She said "mad max world is limbo, Eames/Max is trapped, Arthur to the rescue! AND THEN DIRTY DESERT FUCKING" and thus hit all my buttons

they take your car they take your blood they take your gun and your fuckin' jacket and your pride and your _blood_ (your bloody blood what else can they possibly take?) and you get free but you got nothing left but your legs and the cage around your face

why is that, of all things, so hard to bear?

you threaten five girls with an empty gun for water they don't own, and a woman all rage just like you beats you down for it

boy with your blood in him, doesn't know what to do, thinks he wants to die but what does he know? (dying isn't gonna help anyway, you tried that) - you don't wanna die

you wanna live

***

_'What's your name?'_

_'Does it matter?'_

her name is Furiosa

five in the back of the truck, five, except the girl with the hope's gone, out and down and under horror's back wheels out there and now the boy with the deathwish is in her place, and Furiosa's in the driver's seat

you're just happy to be moving, though you don't even know how you got here to be going anywhere

they don't know your name - _you_ barely know your name - you just know they want to get somewhere

they don't tell you their names but you learn them - Splendid Angharad, lost under the wheels, Toast, who knows how to load a gun, Capable, holding it together for everyone, the Dag, all bile and spit, fragile Cheedo, scared and doing this anyway, Nux, bred for a suicide run. 

And Furiosa.

You feel like you've known them all your life.

***

In the end, you _give_ your blood, and give your name, and give your nod when Furiosa looks down on you from above, and you even get your jacket back, funnily enough, but you don't stay. The green place isn't for you even if you drove like fire to get there, cos it's a sure thing now and you're a gambler at heart, so you walk back out into the desert. Swimming against the tide, that's you, Max.

Max. That's your name, for what it's worth. It doesn't fit like the jacket does. 

But the tide goes with you, at least some of it. That's the thing about tides. They go both ways, right? In and out.

You thought you could walk away from the Citadel, didn't you, and be alone again. But just like there are people swarming towards the green and the water, there are people trickling away. War Boys lost without Immortan Joe to lead them to Valhalla. Imperators who don't want to serve under one of their own. People who don't _know_ how to live in peace and plenty now that they look like getting it.

They ripped the corpse of old Joe apart, remember? Raging feral doesn't just go away. You'd know.

You just walk, back out and down the Fury Road. Maybe the sand will swallow you up again. So many faces, and all of them, every one, you'd swear you'd seen before. They look at you with their thousand-yard stares, and they don't act like they recognise you, but you could swear … that one, that one there, and that one, and them … it's like looking in your rearview mirror. 

Speaking of your rearview mirror though, Max my laddybuck, someone's following you. Not just walking the same trail as you, but following. You know the feeling of a tail, down to your bones.

So you dodge. You find knots of travellers to tuck in behind for a bit every so often. You walk when others sleep, you sleep (or try) when the road's at its most crowded. 

But most of them are going towards Gastown or the Bulletfarm, because people attract people, and so you turn off into the wasteland instead. Makes it easier to know you're still being followed, but harder to get good and lost.

You palm the knife in your pocket, and wait. Three days and three nights, with the weight of being followed pulling you like a chain, before he catches up. You're almost to the canyon, rocks poking up like broken bones through the sand. Bits of pursuit vehicles waiting to cut your feet through your boots. Was it only a week ago that they chased you down? It feels like forever ago. 

'I just want to talk,' your tail says, wisely staying out of your arm's reach, because the second he makes noise you whirl with the long blade in your hand, ready to gut him. Slash, stab, but he just always manages to be out of your way. 'Hey, hey, easy,' he says when you growl at him. 'I just want to talk.'

'I don't,' you say. You want to turn and walk away but you can't be sure he isn't going to pull a gun on you. Safest just to kill him now. 

_'No unnecessary killing!'_ says Capable in the back of your head

Someone else says _'we wake up. If we die in a dream we wake up,'_ and you don't know who it was. Doesn't matter. You dive for the stranger, hit him in the middle and take him down to the dirty sand, savagely hoping there'll be rusty metal in his way, that he'll bleed down here just like you have. 

He just thumps you good and proper wherever tender he can reach until he can hook his feet under himself and flip you over. You throw him off you before the momentum of the roll is lost, and bull after him, feet floundering in the sand. He ankle-taps you - you knuckle-punch dirty and short to his kidneys - he drops his shoulder and literally charges, skinny little shitbag, until you go spine-first through the open window of a crappy dead chase car, and your hand closes around a twisted wreck that used to be a gun. 

You swing it around and pull the trigger right in his fucking unfamiliar unknown _unworn_ face. Hammers fall but there isn't even a spark left in it, and then he's staring at you down the barrel of a sawn-off, and the red mist is settling like blowback. 'Get off me,' you say, struggling under his weight which is finally set right to actually keep you down. The rotten foam of the seats has given way to sharp springs. He's grinding you straight down into them. 

'Who are you?' you demand, and who the fuck gives a fuck, Max?

'You know me,' he pants, still grinding, trying to keep his balance while you're fighting to throw him off. 

'Fuck off.'

There's something in his expression you can't stand, don't deserve. 'What's your name?' he asks softly. Too softly for a man who's got his fingernails cutting in between the veins and tendons of your wrists. 

You spit in his eye, waste precious water, but he doesn't move and you can't get the drop on him any more, you're wedged, you're weighted down. 

'What's your name?' he asks again, breathing it into your ear. You shiver, you fight ... but fighting means feeling him, his body against yours, and through leather and dirt you start to feel the shape of him, the heat of him, and maybe you can't remember that face from the inside like all the others but you're starting to think you know that lean, mean body from the outside.

He feels you feel him. He smiles, blade-curve, against your thinnest skin, pulse point of your throat. You'd bite, if you were on top. Rip his throat out, raging feral Max, if you were where he is. But you're not, so you use the weapons you have, instead, try to use the useless shotgun as a club. 

He beats your wrist against the rotted metal of the chassis until you drop the gun, and he ruts down against you. 'What's your name?' he asks again. 'Who are you?'

He's riding you like a pony, and you're hot for it like the sand outside, burning like magnesium, sticking to your skin. You arch up under him, looking for pressure. You're a chancer, Max, you'll take what you can get when you can get it, and if you're gonna go out like this you might as well get off beforehand. Story you remember, about a guy falling down a cliff, gets stuck in a tree or something next to a patch of wild strawberries. Can't get free, gonna die. But there's these strawberries, right there. 

The moral of the story is, you eat the strawberries. Your cock rides rough in your trousers against the stranger's cock, shape of him comforting against you, and you're slicking the way yourself, leaking like a tap, more water down the drain, lick your lips because his eyes go misty dark like he wants you more than he wants to win this stupid fight. 

When he kisses you, he tastes like dirt and sweat, but the way he moves against you is strawberry-sweet, clean and perfect. 

'You know me,' he says again, panting it against your skin. 'You know me, and I know you.' He's working your fly open, desperate. You should be using this time to get free, instead you're spreading for him like you trust him. 

'You're wrong.'

He's got a finger in you, two fingers, three fingers, time telescoping and you let him in. You fucking let him in. There's no space in here to pull yourself as open as he's pushing you, your knees knock against twisted metal and rust rains down on the pair of you as he pulls his own cock out and pushes himself home. 

Cuts you to the bone, shoving into your body, and if you thought you knew all those faces from before you _know_ you know this. He fucks you hard enough to push noises from deep in your lungs, and you scrabble to hold on to him, needing an anchor in all this fucking shifting sand. You grab for your own cock, too, but he knocks your hand aside to wrap his own long fingers around it. Possessive. 

'Who the fuck are you?' you ask him, growling it into the skin of his throat that you're worrying between your teeth. 'I _know_ you -'

He rears up and your eyes cross in your skull, the pressure inside you so intense, and you're groaning and rolling your hips against him, unstoppable, so close, so fucking close to coming, pleasure sparking across your skin, and he reaches through the shattered back window for something, stretching and shifting as he does it, and that's it, that's what pushes you off the cliff, what blows you to pieces. 

It's been so fucking long, it wrecks you, it wracks you, your body curls like every muscle's been cut, your toes to your fingers, the blood roars in your ears, and through the white noise and the red mist you see what he's holding - the spear, the payload - but it's too late. 

'Go to sleep, Mister Eames,' he whispers, and this time the explosion is for real. 

***

You wake up with a line in your wrist and Arthur looking carefully at you from the other side of a PASIV, like he's not sure if you're going to bolt or not. 

'You okay over there?' he asks, as if he hasn't just pulled you from Limbo. 

'How long?' you ask. Your throat rasps like sandpaper. 

'Three days,' he says. 'At the surface, anyway. Hey, hey, take it easy,' he adds, suddenly worried, as you yank the IV free with maybe a little less care than you should. But your body's reacting. Arthur manages to shove a bucket under you before you throw up all over his nice tidy floor. He's always so prepared. 

'Seriously, are you okay?' he asks when you're done. You don't know. But you shrug. 

'I live, I die, I live again,' you say, because it's true. That's the point of dreaming, isn't it?

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Blood, Dirt, Strawberries](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5556248) by [RsCreighton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton)




End file.
